While still a graduate student at UC San Diego, Nina Katchadourian began the ongoing project she calls "Sorted Books": chance-encountered titles arranged for the camera to form poetic phrases or even mini-narratives.

Q:What about the reference of these works? Some seem very ingrown, others very outer-directed ...

A: A few things are very important every time I do this project. One is that I'm trying to accurately portray the subject whose library I'm in. With the work in the front room, it was a family ... and I was really trying to think about groupings that ... said something about who they were. In the Delaware Art Museum project, with these turn-of-the-century books, I would say it's a portrait of America at a certain point in time.

Q:We hear a lot about the disappearance of the book nowadays. Do you respond to that possibility in this work?

A: It's a big part of the conversation today when I show this work. In 1993 ... it wasn't on anyone's mind. But ... I think what's happened to books is that there will be a burden on them to become more beautiful, more tactile, more compelling as objects. There could be something very good for books about this choice between the physical object and the digital experience of reading.

Q:Do you consider this conceptual art?

A: I admire much work made at that time by many of those artists, but I also like things and making things and making photographs. And sometimes when people hear the term "conceptual artist," they think you're antistuff, and that's not at all how I feel.

Q:And humor?

A: I'm not setting out to make things that are funny, but humor draws people in. ... But it's also very easy to make a lot of one-liners with this project. So it's become increasingly important to me that there's a range of temperaments in the work.